


Primary Sources

by keerawa



Category: Supernatural
Genre: 50states_spn Challenge, Gen, Ghost Stories, Haunted House, Historical Inaccuracy, Libraries, Pre-Series, Research, Teenage Winchesters, casefic, ghost - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-19
Updated: 2011-12-19
Packaged: 2017-10-27 13:49:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 14,846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/296531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keerawa/pseuds/keerawa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Their latest hunt involves a haunted house in Narragansett with a reputation for killing women and children. Dad won't let Sam and Dean anywhere near the mansion, but that doesn't mean they can't help.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to my beta, [](http://counteragent.livejournal.com/profile)[**counteragent**](http://counteragent.livejournal.com/). The Wedderburn House in Narragansett really is rumored to be haunted - you might want to read about the actual legend [here](http://www.hauntedhouses.com/states/ri/wedderburn_mansion.cfm) after you've finished the fictional version, so you aren't spoiled!

They were driving down highway 1A, a scenic Rhode Island beach road. Sam was curled up in the backseat with all their worldly belongings, reading _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ , a warm ocean breeze from Dad’s open window ruffling his hair. Dean was quietly singing along with a CCR song in the passenger seat.

Dad slowed down and took a sharp left turn. Gravel crackled under the tires. Dad pulled over and shifted into park.

“I’ll be right back,” he said, getting out of the car and turning off the engine.

Sam craned his neck to watch as Dad approached the parking barrier blocking their way into a small private road. Dad quickly unlocked the padlock with a key he’d gotten in the mail last week. Then he moved the arm of the barrier up out of the way.

A grizzled old man with a potbelly wandered by with a big yellow lab and stopped to watch Dad wrestle with the barrier.

“You visiting someone here?” the guy asked warily, his dog whining and straining at its leash to greet Dad.

Dad smiled at the man and ignored the dog. “In a way. I’m John Bousquet. Dick’s brother, from Colorado?”

The man’s face cleared. “Oh, Dick. Dick called and mentioned he had some family coming in. I’m glad you’re here for him. Damn shame about his wife and little girl. My grand-daughter used to play with her every summer, you know. In fact, I remember – ”

Dad interrupted. “Dick said we could stay at his cottage here while he was up in Boston. Is that gonna be a problem?”

“Down, Tigger!” the man ordered his dog. It lay down with a pathetic whine, tail thumping against the ground. “No, of course not, family’s always allowed,” he said, holding out his hand for Dad to shake. “Name’s Andy. Andy Hamilton.”

Dad reached out and shook his hand once, firmly. “In that case, we should be heading in. It’s been a long few days in the car.”

Andy nodded sagely. “Right, of course.” He peered into the car. “Will the missus be flying out to join you?”

From the car, Sam watched the set of Dad’s shoulders stiffen.

“I’m a widower,” Dad said curtly, his left hand curling into a fist around his wedding band.

The dog cringed away from Dad, ears down. Andy must’ve had the survival instincts of a fruit fly, ‘cause he didn’t even notice. “Oh, you and Dick, both of you lost a wife? What a terrible tragedy. And you raising two boys on your own, too –”

Dean leaned out his window. “Hey, Andy, is it OK if I take a leak over in those bushes? Haven’t had a bathroom break since Connecticut.”

Andy blanched. “Maidie’s sweetbells? No no, you’d better get over to Dick’s.”

Dad turned around, got into the car, started the engine, and revved it.

“- in number 15,” Andy was saying when the engine noise quieted to its usual growl. “If you or your boys need anything, you drop by, anytime!”

“Thank you for the warm welcome,” Dad said as the Impala slid past the parking barrier. Andy locked the gate down behind them.

“Jesus,” Dean swore under his breath as they drove by a hand-painted sign exclaiming ‘ _Kids at Play! 5 mph speed limit!_ ’

“Yeah,” Dad agreed, stretching his neck. “That’s got to be a new record for getting made by the neighborhood busybody,” he growled. “Anyone asks, I’m a contractor back in Denver, and Dick asked me out here to make some renovations to the Wedderburn House after the ‘accident’. It’s the first time we’ve visited since Sam was born. Got it?”

Dean nodded. “Got it,” he confirmed.

The car rolled past a row of tiny beach houses. Some had fire pits out in front. Other yards were cluttered with toys and bikes. Sam wondered about the kiddie pool. Why bother with one of those when the ocean was a five-minute walk away?

“Sam,” Dad barked.

Sam gave a deep, heart-felt sigh. “You’re a contractor here to renovate your poor grieving brother’s mansion, and I’ve never even met Uncle Dick,” he parroted back.

“That’ll do,” Dad said. “We shouldn’t be here long enough to need anything more elaborate.”

Dad lied; it wasn’t a ‘cottage.’ The place they pulled up to, in lot #29, was a trailer. An aluminum trailer up on blocks. Sam appreciated the irony of a guy who owned a mansion and used a trailer as his vacation home, but he’d really been hoping for more privacy. He grabbed his duffel bag and feather pillow and ran in as soon as Dad unlocked the door.

The double bed at the far end of the trailer must be Dad’s. There was a pair of bunk beds stuffed into the space across from the stove. Sam shoved his pillow onto the bottom bunk, took off his shoes, and rolled around on it. There was one pokey spring near the wall, easy enough to avoid. The blankets smelled a little stale, but not too funky. He’d slept in worse.

Sam sat up, prepared to defend his claim against Dean. They both hated sleeping in the top bunk. Sam because he sometimes rolled around in his sleep at night – he’d never actually fallen out of bed, but he worried it might happen someday. Dean’s wierdo obsession with always taking the bed near the door somehow translated into the one near the floor, when they were stacked up on top of each other.

Dean and Dad still hadn’t come in. Sam got up and looked out the screen door. The two of them were standing by the open trunk of the Impala.

“ – targets women and children,” Dad was saying.

“But, Dad -” Dad held up one finger, and Dean shut his mouth.

“I know you’re a man now,” Dad told him. “You’ve really stepped up, these past few months. You handled yourself like a professional on that Redcap hunt, and there is no one I’d rather have at my back.”

Dean shuffled, uncomfortable with the praise.

“But this spirit, she doesn’t know you like I do. If you step in that house, and she sees you as a boy …” Dad slammed the trunk shut. “It’s an unnecessary risk. This hunt might take a while. So I'll be relying on you to earn some legit cash and take care of Sammy.”

Dean nodded crisply. “Yes sir.”

“Sir, yes sir,” Sam muttered, retreating to his bed. He didn’t need a baby-sitter. And it’s not like either of them really cared. They’d left him alone for three weeks in Denver when they went on that stupid Redcap hunt. Sam had lived off school breakfasts, and school lunches, and cans of soup he heated up on the hot plate in a scuzzy one-room efficiency apartment over a tattoo parlor. There was a four day stretch when Dean didn’t call, and Sam had thrown himself into studying Trigonometry to keep his mind off the fear that Dean and his dad were both dead.

* * *

Sam sat in the town library the next day, reading microfiche of the _Providence Journal_ from the nineteenth century, searching for any mention of the Wedderburn family and their house. The microfiche box had been covered in dust when the librarian delivered them to him with a pained smile that said she wished she could think of a reason to forbid him to mess with her microfiche scanner.

The problem was, they didn’t know when the haunting had started. An article published in the _National Enquirer_ in 1982 claimed that, since the end of World War II, any woman or child that lived in Wedderburn House died within six months. Not the most reliable of sources, but Sam had checked, and it seemed to be true. But this ghost, if it even was a ghost, was subtler than most.

“Means it’s a woman,” Dad had announced as they drove down an empty stretch of I-80.

Sam had offered up contrary examples. Women in White, the Headless Bride, the Clearview ghost – plenty of women’s spirits liked their vengeance quick and bloody.

Dad shook his head. “You’ll learn,” he said.

It pissed Sam off when Dad did that. Declared himself the victor whenever Sam disagreed with him, without even trying to counter his arguments.

Anyway, this ghost was sneaky. Sam had looked up everything he could on the computer and microfiche before they left Denver. He couldn’t be sure which of the deaths that had taken place in Wedderburn House were supernatural, and which were just bad luck. Women died in childbirth. Infants stopped breathing in their cradles. A boy fell out of a tree in the garden and broke his neck. A little girl choked to death on fish bones. A wife fell down the stairs. Swine flu swept through a family of seven in September of 1918. Only the husband, a captain leading his troops against the Hindenburg Line in Europe, survived.

Dick had a thriving landscaping business, with branches all over New England. He’d picked up Wedderburn House for a song. It had sat unoccupied since the last grief-stricken husband and father, Nelson Wedderburn, moved out in 1978 and bequeathed it to the Providence Diocese.

Dick had heard the stories. He’d even read the article in the Enquirer. But he didn’t believe in ghosts. Sam had to wonder, what kind of asshole moves his family into a haunted house known for killing women and children? Dick’s wife and little girl died peacefully in their sleep of carbon monoxide poisoning a month after they’d moved in, on a night when he was out of town on business.

The ghost never hurt the man of the house. Dad might be right, Sam decided grudgingly. That did sound like a woman who was taking out the competition.

The trailer Dick had offered to let them stay in while Dad worked the case was tiny, but it was walking distance from the library, which had a great collection of local historical documents. If they were going to figure out whose bones to burn, Sam would need to pin-point when the haunting began. And that meant starting at the beginning.

There were a few notes jotted down in his notebook already. Captain Japheth Wedderburn built the house in 1830. There were a few references to his ship docking after successful cross-Atlantic trips, and one disastrous trading voyage in 1832. He threw a big party in 1835. There was a detailed account of it in the paper, including a meticulous description of the food, and a mention of Mrs. Wedderburn, their ‘petite and gracious hostess.’ A few brief birth and death notices from less notorious branches of the family, and then an article following Japheth Wedderburn’s death from a heart attack at sea in 1837. Nothing jumped out as useful yet, but you could never tell what scrap of information might be the one to save Dad’s life.

Someone plopped into the chair next to him with a deep sigh. Sam would have assumed it was Dean, if not for the cloud of too-sweet perfume. He finished copying down the details from Japheth’s obituary, closed his notebook, and took a good, hard look at the girl who had interrupted him.

She was his age, pretty, with long hair bleached white-blonde from the sun and a tight Green Day t-shirt that showed off her tits. She popped her gum, sending a waft of mint his way. In his head, Sam could just hear his brother urging him to, ‘ _Get a slice of that action._ ’

“Whatcha doin’?” she asked in a voice thick with the local accent.

“Research,” he answered curtly.

“Huh.” Her eyes roved over the microfiche scanner and his notebook. “You in summer school, or something?”

“No, it’s just for fun,” he said, and then almost bit his tongue. Now she’d think he was a total freak.

Her dark purple-red lips curved into a skeptical pout. “Didn’t think anybody used those things anymore,” she said dismissively. “Isn’t it all on the computer?”

Sam decided she must be the kind of girl that never made it past the magazine rack by the door. “Not the historical documents,” he told her.

She shrugged and made a move to stand up, probably so she could go spread the word about what a total dweeb he was, guaranteeing he’d be stuck with no one except his brother to talk to in this town.

“My mother,” Sam said quickly. Dad had already mentioned he was a widower, and what harm could it do? “She was a historian.”

“Really?” she asked, settling back down into her chair.

“Yeah,” he said. And then, because the bigger the lie, the more people believed it, he added, “She was really famous. She won the Locke Award.”

Locke was the name of Sam’s history teacher in Mississippi last spring who assigned them to do some original research for a National History Day project. Sam tried to kill two birds with one stone by writing up the research he was doing for Dad, on a string of brutal slave deaths on a local plantation in 1811 and their striking similarities to some recent murders. Mr. Locke gave him a zero for the project. Said that the topic was ‘sensationalistic and completely inappropriate’, and then accused him of plagiarizing it. Asshole.

Sam gave the girl a thin smile. “Mom said that every town has its dark secrets, festering away, that everyone knows but no one talks about.” Like the lynching up in Duluth where hundreds of people had been part of the mob that murdered three black circus performers, yet no one was ever charged. That little town in Colorado that lost a couple hikers a year to ‘bears’, when the locals all knew which part of the woods to avoid at night. A respected factory owner in Albany had sacrificed a dozen young women in his basement to keep his terminally –ill daughter alive; the police chief tried to run Dad out of town when he started investigating the deaths. “Those secrets - that’s what my mother’s research was about,” Sam told the girl.

The girl leaned closer to look at his notebook, her breast brushing against Sam’s bare arm. He shivered.

“And that’s what you’re doing?” she asked. “Trying to find the town’s dark secrets?”

Sam shrugged. “I guess you could put it that way.”

“And how about you?” she teased. She was flirting. Sam was sure of it. “Have you got a dark secret?”

Sam almost laughed in her face. He was holding secrets that would make her run screaming. “Of course.”

The girl scooted her chair over until it knocked into Sam’s. She whispered in his ear. “Gonna tell me?”

Sam sat back a little and checked the girl out. She bit her lip and smiled invitingly. ‘ _You’re in there, Sammy,_ ’ whispered his inner Dean.

“My mom,” Sam said quietly. “She didn’t just die. She was murdered.”

The girl gasped and sat back in her chair, searching his eyes. “Seriously?”

Sam nodded.

“That’s ... that’s terrible. I’m so sorry,” said her mouth. Her eyes said, ‘ _That’s exciting._ ’ Her lean towards him said, ‘ _Tell me more._ ’

“It was a long time ago,” Sam said, scrambling for details he could feed this girl to keep her on the line.

She nodded and then glanced at her watch. “Oh crap. I gotta go. My Mom’s gonna have a cow. But, uh, some of us are getting together for a bonfire tonight. You want to come?”

Sam never got invited to those things, unless he was getting dragged along as Dean’s little brother. “Yeah, sure,” he said like it was no big deal.

She grinned and stood up. “Cool. Ten o’clock at the south end of Scarborough beach.”

“I’ll be there,” Sam promised as she walked away. He nearly got caught checking out her ass in those perfectly torn jeans when she spun back around.

“Oh, I’m such a ditz,” she exclaimed. “I’m Christy, by the way.”

“Sam,” Sam introduced himself. “Pleased to meet you.”

“Oh, you’re, like, a total gentleman,” Christy said. “My friends’ll love you. See you tonight, Sam!”

Sam waved good-bye, took a deep breath, and wiped his hands down his jeans before digging back into 1840’s newspapers.

* * *

When Sam got back from the library, he found Dean sprawled out topless at the picnic table in front of their trailer. Dean’s back and shoulder had already gone pink on one side from sitting in the sun, he noticed. Pretty soon Dean’s sunburn would flare to a deep lobster-red. Then he’d be cranky for a few days until it peeled away, leaving him with a decent tan and a million freckles.

It happened every summer. Sam had tried getting Dean to wear sunblock, but he thought it was just for girls. Given how many girls had asked Dean to put lotion on their backs yesterday at the beach, Dean might have a point. One girl in a red bikini made these little moans when Dean got his hands on her. Sam had to go stand in the freezing cold, seaweedy ocean for a couple of minutes so he didn’t embarrass himself.

“Hey man,” Dean greeted him. “Got a job at a video store in town. I get free rentals on everything but new releases, and there’s a VCR in the trailer. What do you wanna watch tonight,” he asked, holding up two video boxes. “‘Psycho’ or ‘A Fistful of Dollars’?”

“How about something we haven’t seen a dozen times,” Sam suggested, tossing his notebook onto the table so Dean could read through the history he’d found on the Wedderburn family and heading inside to get a drink of water.

He stood on tip-toe in the breathless heat of the trailer to grab a plastic cup from the cupboard over the sink, filled it up, and joined Dean outside. They’d probably end up spending a lot of their time out here. It was cramped inside the trailer, and the breeze outside made the heat bearable.

“Then how do we know it’s any good?” Dean countered.

Sam shrugged, squinting against the bright sunlight. He took a gulp of his cold water, sat on the sparse, dry grass in the shade of the table, settled his cup on the ground next to him, and then flopped backwards to lay down.

“I made some lemonade,” Dean offered. “There’s a pitcher in the fridge, if you want some.”

“Real lemonade?” Sam asked with a yawn. Maybe he’d take a nap so he’d be wide awake for the bonfire tonight.

“Nah, better. It’s Country Time Pink Lemonade.”

Sam snorted. “No thanks, I’m good.”

Sam lay there and let his sweaty t-shirt dry in the breeze as Dean paged through his notebook.

“Christ,” Dean muttered when he was done. “Not much to go on, huh?”

“The Wedderburns weren’t rich or crazy enough to be newsworthy,” Sam agreed.

“We’ll have to ask around,” Dean said. “Sometimes the juiciest stuff doesn’t make it into the papers, right? Just the ghost stories told round the campfire.”

Sam felt a guilty lurch. “Oh, yeah, uh, that reminds me. I got invited to a bonfire party down on the beach tonight.”

There was a creak of wood, and Sam could feel his brother looking at him.

“Invited by who?” Dean asked. “The librarian?”

“No,” Sam answered. “Just some girl I ran into at the library. Christy.”

“Cha-ris-ti-e,” Dean said, somehow turning it into a four-syllable word. “She hot?”

Sam sat up on his elbows. “Pretty hot,” he agreed. “Nice …” Sam waved at his own chest.

Dean broke into a wide grin. “You sly dog! Two days in town, and you’re picking up chicks at the library? You may be worthy of the Winchester name after all.”

Sam held up his hand, bracing for the high-five he knew was coming. Dean’s palm met his in a solid slap that left his hand stinging.

The Impala’s deep rumble warned them that Dad was on the way.

Dean pulled Sam up off the ground. Sam dusted the bits of dirt and grass off his clothes and legs.

Dad pulled the car in close to the trailer. When he got out, he opened the back and pulled out a bag of groceries.

“Grab the charcoal out of the back seat,” he told Dean. He put the groceries away and then cooked them up some hamburgers on the grill, just like a real dad, chattering about his day while they sat at the picnic table to eat dinner. Of course, on TV their dad’s work-day stories would involve annoying bosses and project deadlines, not a four-story house so lousy with EMF that he couldn’t figure out where to start.

Dad seemed pretty mellow about it, though. When Sam brought up the bonfire party, he agreed right away that Sam could go.

Dean leaned forward, super-serious considering the ketchup smeared across his mouth. “No swimming in the ocean at night,” he told Sam. “There’s riptide currents, jellyfish, maybe sharks – remember Jaws? And mermaids, too. They look like chicks with big tits, but what they’ve actually got are big, razor-sharp teeth, ready to eat your face off. And salt doesn’t work on any monsters from the sea, so –”

“Dad,” Sam complained flatly. “Dean’s been possessed by the ghost of somebody’s Mom again.”

Dad grinned. He got up, ruffled Sam’s hair, and started picking up the dirty dishes. He shoved a paper towel into Dean’s hand on his way back into the trailer.

Dean took it without looking and wiped his face. Once Dad was safely in the trailer, he leaned forward and said quietly, “This girl who invited you. Chastity?”

“Christy,” Sam muttered.

“Whatever. If she’s willing to put out, go for it, but wrap it up, man.” Dean said, reaching into his back pocket and pulling out his wallet. He tugged two flat golden packets out and slid them across the table.

Trojans. Ribbed and lubricated for her pleasure. “Oh my God,” Sam protested.

Dean pointed uncompromisingly at the condoms.

“I cannot believe this is my life,” Sam said, picking up the condoms and sticking them in his front pocket. “She’s not that kind of girl, Dean.”

Dean shook his head. “Rookie mistake. The girls with the bad rep, that let it all hang out, they always use a rubber. It’s these ‘nice girls’,” Dean said, making finger quotes in the air, “That get all carried away by their emotions, or romance, or moonlight on the beach or some shit, and end up catching something.”

“Like that girl Alice, who gave you the clap back in San Antonio?” Sam challenged him.

“Exactly,” Dean said without an ounce of embarrassment. “Learn from my mistakes, grasshopper. You do not wanna be pissing fire for a week, trust me.”

“You caught an STD in San Antonio?” said Dad from the door of the trailer, his face like thunderclouds. “And this is the first I’m hearing of it?”

Dean glared at Sam for a second before turning around to face their father. “Yeah. It wasn’t a big deal. I took some penicillin from the med kit, cleared it right up.”

Dad shook his head. “That’s not the point, and you know it. I got those antibiotics for line of duty injuries, not so you can screw around like some stupid GI in Bangkok.” Dad was getting worked up, red in the face and voice raw.

“Dad, I’m sorry,” Dean said, standing up and hurrying over to Dad. Dean could sometimes get through to Dad when he started to spin out. “It was just the one time. It was stupid, really fucking stupid, but I learned my lesson, okay? I’m always careful now, one hundred percent.”

Dad took a deep breath, staring down at him. Then he stepped back. “You’d better be,” he mumbled. He took another breath. “I’m going out,” he announced. “And you,” he said, pointing at Dean. “You are staying in.”

Dean nodded, shoulders low.

“I brought the bag of shotguns in earlier,” Dad said in a quieter voice. “When I get back tonight I expect to find every one of them as clean as the day they came out of the factory.”

Yeah, right. When Dad got back tonight, he’d be too drunk to take his shoes off without Dean’s help.

“Yes sir,” Dean agreed.

“And you,” Dad said, looking at Sam.

Sam sat up straighter.

“You go to that party tonight. Drink one beer, but act like you’ve had more. Make sure they all know that you weren’t close to Dick’s family, and see if you can get a round of ghost stories started.”

“Yes sir,” Sam echoed, and hated himself for it.

The Impala fish-tailed a little on the gravel when Dad pealed out. They both watched him drive away.

“I’m sorry,” Sam told his brother, and meant it. They’d been having a good night, until he screwed things up. “I thought he was still inside.”

Dean shrugged. “My own fault for catching something in the first place,” he said, subdued.

* * *

A few minutes before ten o’clock, Sam stepped out of the trailer into the warm, damp, salt-tinged night. He walked towards Scarborough beach in the dark, wearing his only pair of jeans that went all the way down to his ankles and didn’t have any holes, paired with a clean white t-shirt. He stepped sure-footed down crumbling sidewalks and the soft, grassy verges of tiny beach houses, automatically ducking his head as he passed under streetlights to keep his eyes adjusted to the dark. Something slipped between the shadows ahead of him. Sam froze, his hand moving towards the butterfly knife in his pocket. A car cruised by; its headlights revealed a cat’s green eyes shining from under a bush. Sam stretched his neck to release the tension, pissed at himself for getting keyed up over nothing.

This felt more like a hunt than a party, thanks to Dad’s last-minute instructions. Sam had tried to get Dean to watch a movie with him after dinner, but Dean had just grunted and taken up every square inch of open floor space with shotguns and cleaning supplies. Sam sniffed at his shirt, hoping that he didn’t reek of the Break-Free CLP Dean used to clean the weapons.

Sam forced himself to stand under the next streetlight. He stared up at the bugs swarming around the bulb, humming under his breath, until even his peripheral vision was shot. Then he stumbled down the sidewalk, just a normal kid on his way to a party.

Sam followed the sound of the waves across the flat black expanse of an enormous parking lot. He passed a big wooden building with public restrooms, cold outdoor showers, and windows for selling food. There was an angry caw, and Sam paused to watch two white blobs - seagulls scrapping over something in the sand. Nowhere near big enough to be a body, he determined as his night vision came back. Not unless it was in pieces. Of course, it was probably just a dead fish, or a sandwich left over from someone’s picnic.

Up ahead there was the light of a bonfire and the sound of people’s voices, laughing and singing along to Madonna on someone’s boom-box.

A figure came running towards Sam, silhouetted by the bonfire. Sam braced himself and caught an armful of beer and honey-suckle scented girl.

“Sam,” Christy gasped. “I knew you’d come. Claudia said I was making you up. Come on,” she said, tugging him unsteadily towards the fire.

“Guys, this is Sam,” she called out to them. “He’s wicked smart.”

Sam winced and tried to keep the smile on his face.

“Sam, that’s Jack, my brother Al, his girlfriend Nancy, and that’s Claudia,” she said pointedly. “The rest of these assholes will just have to introduce themselves. Danny – get Sam here a bee-ah,” Christy demanded as she dragged him into the circle of firelight cast by the bonfire.

‘Bee-ah? ’wondered Sam. What was … oh. Duh. ‘Beer’ sounded funny in Rhode Island-ese.

“Yes ma’am,” Danny answered crisply from his position by the keg, before breaking into giggles.

“Military?” Sam asked Christy quietly, squinting through the flickering firelight to get a good look at everybody. He attached a name tag to each person in his head, so he wouldn’t forget. When you’re always the new kid, you need to be good with names.

“His dad’s navy, stationed up in Newport,” she whispered back loudly.

Danny walked over to them with the utter concentration of the very drunk and shoved an overly full plastic cup of beer into Sam’s hand. The beer splashed onto him. So much for having a clean shirt. Sam managed a smile and a hopefully convincing, “Thanks!”

Christy collapsed down to sit on a piece of driftwood by the fire, dragging Sam with her. Sam barely managed to avoid spilling the beer all over his jeans. Well, at least Dad would be too drunk when he got home to notice if Sam smelled like a brewery. Sam took a hesitant sip of the beer and made a face. It tasted like horse-piss. Not that Sam knew what horse piss tasted like. Unlike human piss, which he knew all too well because his brother was a jerk who believed the saying ‘who pissed in your Cheerios’ could and should be answered literally.

He kept an arm around Christy, mostly to keep her upright, and hoped she wouldn’t barf on him. As the night went on the music was turned down low, then off. People huddled around the fire in little cliques, drinking beer and talking quietly, watching the fire burn down to embers. No one said anything to Sam. He wasn’t sure if that was because he was new, if it had something to do with Christy being draped all over him, or if he’d screwed up somehow already.

Sam figured it was time to get to work. He waited for a lull in the conversation around him. “So, is the Wedderburn House really haunted?” Sam asked loudly.

There was an uncomfortable silence.

“You mean your uncle’s place?” Al asked.

“Yeah, I guess.” Sam shrugged. “I mean, it’s not like I ever met the guy. Him and my dad aren’t close. We never even visited Rhode Island before.” Sam sipped beer from his plastic cup, hoping he looked enough like a shallow douchebag to pull this off. “It sounded like a cool story, but if it’s not real...” He trailed off, dangling that like fresh bait in the water.

“Oh, it’s real,” Al jumped in to defend the local legend. “The old Wedderburn place is as haunted as they come, by the ghost of Japheth Wedderburn. He was a sea-captain. They say he murdered his wife, then hung himself up in the attic, and he’s haunted the place ever since.”

 _They_ were wrong. Japheth died of a heart attack at sea, not from hanging himself in a murder-suicide. That was the problem with trying to get information from ghost stories. It was like playing a game of Chinese whispers. Only, in Sam’s version, if you didn’t find the truth, people died.

Christy lifted her head off of Sam’s shoulder, leaving a damp patch behind. “I heard it was a slave,” she said. She sniffed, wiped her mouth, then continued. “She was Japheth’s mistress. When the wife found out, she poisoned the slave. It was all covered up, of course, and they buried her out back. Ever since then, she takes her revenge on any woman who dares live in the house.”

“No suh!” said a girl scornfully from the far side of the bonfire. “Rhode Island didn’t have slaves, not even back then.”

Which was a good point, although Christy’s story sounded promising.

“She was an _escaped_ slave,” Christy insisted in a voice way too loud to be that close to Sam’s ear. He leaned away. “Wedderburn was part of the Underground Railroad. There’s a secret room under the eaves where the slaves would hide out on their way to Canada.”

Sam’s finger’s twitched for his notebook. A secret room, and the possibility that Wedderburn House had been a stop on the Underground Railroad? Definitely worth checking out.

“You’re both wrong,” Claudia announced. She was a tiny girl huddled into the depths of a white hoody as if it were 50 degrees out, instead of a muggy 80. “It was Wedderburn’s wife that died. She was young – really young, like fourteen. He kept getting her pregnant, but by the time he got back to shore she’d lost the baby, every time. They say there’s a whole row of unmarked graves in the family graveyard full of little dead babies. After the sixth time it happened, she disappeared. Japheth said she’d gone back to Spain, but everybody knows he killed her.”

“I heard it was the housekeeper,” Jack interrupted.

“Whatever. They were probably in it together, because he married the housekeeper, like, a month after his wife disappeared. Then he gets _her_ pregnant.” Claudia stood up and moved closer to the fire, warming her hands over it. Sam was impressed with her showmanship.

When she spoke again, her voice was deeper. “The day Japheth’s new wife gave birth to a healthy baby boy is the day his old wife came back, all rotted and wearing a black veil. She smothered the new-born baby in its cradle, choked the new mommy to death with the umbilical cord, and gave Japheth a big, bloody kiss before disappearing back to Hell.”

“Ewwww!” Christy shrieked. “Claudia, that is so gross!”

Sam had to agree. The bit with the umbilical cord was pretty nasty, even by his standards.

Claudia beamed a smile and sauntered back to her own piece of driftwood. Claudia’s story would match the motives of the ghost they were working with, although the bloody violence of it didn’t fit.

Danny was noisily sick in the sand behind them. The conversation turned to other times and places they’d all thrown up. Sam thought about making up something spectacular, but being declared ‘The Pukiest of Them All’ didn’t really seem worth the effort.

A light fog crept up the beach, and then gradually thickened. A mournful fog horn sounded out at sea. As if that were a signal, the party broke up. Sam helped Christy’s brother drag her to his beat-up Subaru wagon.

“Thanks, man,” Al said, fastening the seat belt across Christy’s (still impressive) chest. “Want a ride?”

Sam thought about it. He usually avoided letting people know where he lived – motels and sleazy apartments never won him any cool points. But it seemed like the entire town was already all up in his business, so he might as well save himself the walk. “Yeah, that’d be great.”

Al unlocked the back door. Sam climbed in, pushed a month’s worth of fast food wrappers out of his way, and settled gingerly on the vinyl seat.

“Sorry about the mess,” Al said over his shoulder. “Oh, and the buckle on the seat belt back there’s busted.”

Sam nodded and rolled down the window. Al’s car smelled about like you’d expect, with all those bits of food baking in the summer sun all day long. “I’m staying at Dick’s place,” Sam said, trying to avoid saying the word ‘trailer’, “up on Burnside –”

“Yeah, I know,” Al said.

 _Of course_ , Sam thought sourly.

“Christy wouldn’t stop blabbing about you over dinner.”

Sam sat back in the seat and smiled until Al dropped him off. Dad might not appreciate him attracting that much attention, but a girl had been interested enough to ask around about him. Sam opened the creaky screen door of the trailer and heard Dad’s deep half-snores. He padded in, got undressed, and slipped between the covers of his bunk.

“Did she put out?” Dean whispered.

“She passed out,” Sam confessed.

Dean laughed quietly. “Better luck next time, man.”

Sam heard Dean plump up his pillow and lie back down, a sure sign the conversation was over. They fell asleep to the sound of the fog horn and Dad's snores.


	2. Primary Sources [PG] gen pre-series casefic 2/2

Sam sat with his family at the picnic table the next morning, eating breakfast. The sky was a deep blue with tiny wisps of white clouds way up high. Bees buzzed in their neighbor’s flower bushes. Sam was half-asleep, nodding over his Cornflakes and Folger’s coffee. He filled in Dad and Dean on the three ghost stories he’d gotten from Al, Christy, and Claudia at the bonfire party.

Dad perked right up at the mention of a secret room ‘under the eaves’. He said he’d search for that room today, and check the family graveyard on the property for any sign of a row of infants’ graves or a grave that might belong to Japheth’s wife or mistress. There wasn’t much chance of finding an unmarked grave over 150 years later, but it was worth a shot.

Sam would be back at the library again. Since all of the stories agreed that Wedderburn House had been haunted since the beginning, he could focus his research on the 1830’s, look for any mention of Japheth’s wife or mistress, and see if he could confirm the rumor about the house being a station on the Underground Railroad.

Dean had to work from 10 to six, but he said there were a couple of old guys who seemed to spend all afternoon on the bench outside the store, drinking ice coffee from the Dunkin Donuts down the street and chatting. He’d see if he could get them talking about Japheth.

By the time that was decided, Sam was picking up his bowl to slurp down the last of the milk from his cereal. His t-shirt was already sticking between his shoulder blades with sweat. Across the road, a little girl in a bright purple bathing suit was peddling her tricycle up and down in front of a tiny yellow cottage with a look of intense concentration on her face.

Dad stiffened. “Nosy neighbor alert,” he muttered under his breath. Sam twisted around and saw Andy walking up the road towards them.

“Morning John,” Andy bellowed heartily from fifty feet out. “It’ll be a scorcher today, I heard on the news. You and your boys gonna hit the beach, maybe, before it gets too hot?”

Dad shook his head. “I need to get some work done over at Dick’s, and my eldest here got himself a job at the video store.”

Andy sat down at their table, across from Dean, glanced at him, gave a double-take, and whistled. “You got some sun yesterday,” he commented.

Dean shrugged.

“And how about you, Sam?” Andy asked. “You going to the beach today?”

“Nah,” Sam said, staring into his empty coffee mug. “Think I’ll head to the library when it opens. They’ve got air conditioning.”

Andy smiled knowingly. “And pretty girls, too, from what I hear.”

Sam felt a blush heat his cheeks. This was getting ridiculous.

“Well,” Andy said, tapping the table for emphasis. “I don’t mean to interrupt your breakfast. Just wanted to drop by and invite you all to a potluck supper at our place tonight. Nothing fancy, just a little Burnside Avenue tradition.”

“We’d love to come,” Dad said quickly. “What should we bring?”

“Oh, anything you like,” Andy replied, standing up from the table. “Jimbo is grilling up his famous orange-glaze chicken wings, Maidie’s making stuffies, and Jen’s bringing enough Swedish meatballs to feed an army. You could bring a side, another main dish, a salad, dessert – whatever. Folks mostly bring their own beverages. Show up any time after sun-down. We’re just up the street. You can’t miss it.” Andy waved good-bye and then crossed the street.

“See you tonight!” Dad called to him.

Andy gave the little girl on her tricycle a side-hug and then meandered down the road, stopping to exchange a few words with a guy watering his lawn and a well-endowed woman jogging with a Rottweiler. Apparently everybody was invited. Dean puckered up to whistle at the jogger, but reconsidered when Sam gave him a dirty look.

Dad watched Andy go and then turned to see his sons staring at him like he’d sprouted horns.

“Trust me, short of actually discharging a firearm at this potluck, there is nothing we do could that would attract more attention than not showing up,” he informed them.

“Okay,” Dean said uncertainly. “But what are we gonna bring?”

Dad finished off his coffee and shook his head. “Good question. Come on inside, boys. Supply check.”

Inside the trailer, Sam sat on his bunk while Dean and Dad crowded into the tiny kitchen area. Dean got on his knees to look through the little fridge under the counter, while Dad checked the cupboards over-head.

“We’ve got a couple pounds of ground beef left from the hamburgers,” Dean reported out. “It’s still good, but we probably need to use it up tonight. There’s two green peppers and a big onion.”

“We’ve got …” Dad sorted through the cupboard with a clink of bottles. “Worcestershire sauce, A1 steak sauce, Tabasco sauce, maple syrup, peanut butter, powdered garlic and curry powder, a bag of flour, some Grey Poupon, salt and pepper and a huge bottle of ketchup. There’s also something called coffee syrup.”

Dean looked up at him. “We could whip up some taverns.”

“Sloppy Joes?” Sam asked uneasily, more familiar than he liked with the school lunch travesties.

Dad nodded. “Don’t worry, no one’s going to expect a masterpiece,” he reassured Sam. “Manwiches it is. I’ll pick up a couple dozen buns on the way back tonight.”

The day’s research was a bust. There was plenty of documentation on the Underground Railroad in Rhode Island, but the ‘conductors’ involved had mostly been Quakers in Central Falls, and there was no mention of Narragansett at all. There was no death notice for Japheth’s wife; Sam couldn’t even find her name.

As dusk faded into night, the Winchesters headed down the street in formation. Dad was on point with a pan full of spicy red-sauced ground beef. Dean, at the rear, had 3 bags of hamburger buns. Sam was in the center, carrying two cans of RC Cola, for him and Dean, and Dad’s can of Coors.

Andy was right – you couldn’t miss his potluck. The area was lit with the stinky torches that were supposed to drive away mosquitoes. Four houses had consolidated their lawn furniture. The usual picnic table was flanked by card tables and lounges, deck chairs and folding chairs. Some were occupied, mostly by a group of older women. A few teenage boys were sitting on the grass. There was a playpen; Sam peeked in and saw three babies crawling all over two little dogs. Around twenty-five people had shown up for the party. Christy wasn’t one of them.

“Glad you could make it,” Andy called out when he caught sight of them. “Put your dish down on the table over there.”

Dad led them between Andy’s place (it had a big sign on it, declaring it was, indeed, Andy’s Place) and the neighboring cottage. There was a thin strip of green grass lined by folding tables crowded with food. Dad wedged his pan in between a plate of dumplings and a bowl of macaroni salad. Dean placed the buns next to it, hanging precariously over the edge of the table. Sam handed Dean a soda and Dad his beer.

The tank of a guy manning the grill nodded them towards a stack of paper plates, gave them each three chicken wings, and then set them loose on the rest of the food with a command to, “Load up! There’s plenty more where that came from!”

Sam decided to try a little bit of everything. Swedish meatballs and stuffed clams, pizza chips and pasta salad, corn on the cob and lasagna. He tried to balance a dumpling on his plate, but it rolled off onto the ground. He eyed it mournfully.

“You can come back for seconds, you know,” said the whip-thin elderly woman next to him, in a voice that spoke of decades of ignoring the Surgeon General’s warnings. “In fact, everyone would be insulted if you didn’t.”

Sam grinned at her sheepishly. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Now you are a polite young man. You must be Dick’s nephew – Simon, is it?”

“Sam,” he corrected her.

“That’s right. I’m Maidie,” she introduced herself. “Those stuffies are mine,” she said, indicating the stuffed clams on Sam’s plate. “And what did your family bring tonight? I want to make sure I try it before it’s all gone.”

He pointed to the Sloppy Joes.

“Oh, dynamites!” Maidie said, delighted. “I haven’t had one of those in years!”

At his confused look, she winked. “That’s what we call them, up north.”

“In Canada?” Sam asked.

She laughed, a big, deep belly-laugh too big for her, and then erupted in a hacking cough. Sam looked around, placed his plate carefully on top of a cooler, and filled a paper cup from a water carrier. Maidie patted his arm gratefully as she sipped. “No, no, I mean up north in Woonsocket.”

“Where?” Sam asked, picturing the appropriate pages in their battered road atlas.

“Near Cumberland?” she offered.

He shook his head.

“About an hour’s drive north up 146, right on the border with Massachusetts.”

“Oh.” There was something almost dizzying about it, about a place so small that an hour drive could be considered, ‘up north’, and require its very own name for Sloppy Joes.

“There’s a good handful of us from up there. The younger folks with families mostly drive down for the weekend in the summer. That’s why we start supper so late,” she apologized. “So everyone has time to drive down after work.”

Eight o’clock didn’t seem all that late to eat, to him, but Sam nodded understandingly. “Only in the summer? They don’t drive down in the winter?” The trailer would get kind of cold, but Sam could imagine being out here by the sea in the winter, and it sounded nice. Quiet. Not so crowded.

Maidie cocked her head. “Didn’t your uncle tell you? It’s all summer housing, here. We’re only allowed on the property May to September,” she said.

“Right. I forgot,” Sam said uncomfortably, wondering where Maidie and Andy and all these other people lived the other half of the year.

“You and your family weren’t expecting to stay here year-round, were you?” she asked, looking a bit alarmed, as if wondering the same thing about him.

“No, of course not,” Sam replied confidently, because that possibility had honestly never crossed his mind.

“Uh-huh,” she peered at Sam. “Why don’t you go sit over there and get to know some of the other boys,” Maidie urged him.

Sam nodded. He headed towards the group of four teenage boys sitting on the grass, talking about some pitcher named Flash Gordon.

“Hi, I’m Sam,” he said brightly as he reached them. He recognized Jack from the bonfire last night.

“Hey,” said Jack. There was an awkward silence.

Sam looked around and noticed that Dean was across the yard, listening in on Dad’s conversation with such intensity he didn’t even notice the well-endowed Rottweiler lady show up with a spinach salad. Sam managed a half-wave good-bye to the guys sitting on the grass with his hands full of food and soda and wandered over to Dean. He sat down on the front step of Andy’s place, and eaves-dropped while inhaling the food off his plate.

“A secret room?” said a balding guy in his early fifties wearing a Pawtucket Red Sox jersey. “Well, I’ve never heard of one in Wedderburn House, but it wouldn’t surprise me. A lot of those sea captains were as crazy as they were rich, and they built their mansions to match.”

The group of men, all with a beer in hand, talked about the House and what they knew about its history. None of them knew any more than the kids Sam had talked to last night; every one of them had to explain, in great detail, exactly what he didn’t know.

The pizza chips were kind of dry, but the rest of the food was delicious, especially the Swedish meatballs. More neighbors drifted in as the night went on until there must have been fifty people hanging around and chatting. Like magic, the empty dishes on the tables were replaced by new, full ones. It reminded Sam of that story, ‘Stone Soup’, where a man showed up in a village that was starving and conned them all into donating a little something to spice up his stone soup, and by the end there was more soup than anyone could eat.

“Hey, Sam,” Andy said as he walked past carrying a bunch of empty beer bottles. “When I invited Christy’s family to the potluck, she asked me tell you she can’t make it. She and her brother are both grounded after last night.”

Sam nodded. He was glad Christy was okay, and wasn’t avoiding him or anything, but it’s not like they were a couple. He went back to get some more of those amazing meatballs and ended up with a plate of new food to try. Goulash and summer squash and fried shrimp. Spicy sausage and shepherd’s pie and calamari swimming in garlic sauce.

Sam had a personal rule about never eating seafood anywhere more than 100 miles from the ocean. He’d made up the rule after a horrible bout of food poisoning he’d gotten from eating salmon at an Applebee’s in Wyoming. But here, where you could actually smell the sea on the breeze at night, the seafood was awesome.

Sam wondered if anyone would mind if he smuggled some left-overs back to the trailer for them to eat tomorrow. He was proud to see that their pan full of Sloppy Joe meat had been eaten up and scraped clean.

Dean had a plate full of desserts – cookies and brownies and some unholy mixture of fruit with red Jello and Cool Whip. There was also a strawberry rhubarb pie that Dean moaned obscenely over, swearing it was the best he’d ever tasted. One of the younger guys sitting at the table with Dad must have overheard him.

The man grinned at them. “My wife Alice made that one. It’s a treat, eh? She’s the one with the long black braid and the baby on her hip over there, if you want to tell her yourself. She might even put one aside for you special,” he suggested.

Like a shot, Dean appeared at Alice’s side. Sam could see his arms wave as he extolled the virtues of Alice’s pie; the women around him burst out laughing at something he said. Well, he certainly had the young wives eating out of the palm of his hand. Sam hoped Dean would leave it at that, and not put his foot in it by starting to flirt.

An old car drove slowly up the road. As it got closer Sam recognized it as a Camaro. The car pulled in, headlights pointing directly at the party, stopping all conversation. Even at idle, its engine was a dull roar. The engine coughed its way to silence. Sam stood up protectively, blinking away the spots in his vision as someone stepped out of the car.

“I’ve got hermits from Wright’s Dairy!” the man announced, and everyone under the age of sixty swarmed towards him.

“Hold it!” a woman yelled out like a drill sergeant. Sam recognized the voice as Maidie’s. “Back, you heathens. Give my son some room. I’ll make sure everyone gets theirs. Abbey? Abbey! Where is that girl …” Maidie scanned the crowd and locked eyes with Sam. “Sam, get over heah!”

Sam glanced over at Dad, who nodded. He hurried towards Maidie’s, slipping through the crowd.

“Jeet?” she asked when he arrived at her side. She sighed at the look on his face. “Did-you-eat, Sam?” she carefully enunciated, as if he were slow.

Sam nodded, and found himself assigned to deliver ‘hermits’, a kind of big, flat molasses cookie with raisins, to the elders at the party.

“I’ll make sure you get a few extra to take home for your trouble,” Maidie promised, and Sam wasn’t even sure he liked molasses cookies, but he figured saying so might get him lynched by the crowd of fanatics who were currently devouring boxes full of the things. So he got his cheeks pinched, and his hair ruffled by the old women gathered around the picnic table, along with an invitation to Mass at St. Mary’s on Sunday.

“We’re not Catholic,” he informed the table of blue-haired ladies.

“Just ‘cause your fatha’s lapsed, doesn’t mean you can’t come to Mass,” the woman with the most improbable perm informed him nasally. “My Manny’d be happy to give you a ride. We’re in number 44. Come by at eight-thirty Sunday morning if you want.”

Sam declined as gracefully as possible. A dog started howling mournfully from behind the cottage. Dad and Dean both stood up and started casually walking the perimeter. Dogs were sensitive to monsters and supernatural creatures. Sam hurried over to Andy. “Hey, is it okay if I go check on your dog?” he asked. “I love dogs.”

“Would ya?” Andy asked. “Tigger thinks we’re torturing him, inviting all these people over and keeping him leashed up out back. He gets too excited; he’d knock over some little old lady, break her hip. If you go play with him for a minute he’ll quiet right down.”

Sam trotted past the tables of food and found Tigger sitting at the end of his chain, which had him connected to a tiny shed. The big yellow lab switched from howling to frantic whining when it saw him, and then rolled over on his back and wriggled in joy when Sam bent down to pet him. “Hey there, Tigger,” Sam crooned. Tigger’s tail whapped him in the leg as it wagged like crazy.

Sam realized he was having a good time. He thought about Maidie’s question; about living here, year-round. Sam could be happy here, living in a cottage, or even a trailer. He could get a dog, and a girlfriend, and talk about Flash Gordon, and learn to like molasses cookies. He’d get a driver’s permit – not the flawless fake driver’s license Dean had handed him when he turned fifteen in May; a real one. Dean could work at the video store, and Dad … Sam’s imagination failed.

Dad was never going to settle down. Not until he found the thing that killed Mom. Probably not even then. So there was no point trying to fit in.

Dean appeared between the two cottages and tilted his head. Sam shot him an ‘all clear’ hand signal to tell him Tigger wasn’t informing them of some impending attack. Dean’s fingers curled by his side in a confirmation, and he walked away to let Dad know.

“Bye, Tigger,” Sam said, standing up and brushing the fur off his hands. Depending on how this hunt went, there was a good chance he’d never see the dog again.

* * *

Sam was waiting at the front door of the library the next morning when the librarian opened it at exactly ten A.M.

“Good morning, Sam,” she said tolerantly. “What can I do for you today? More nineteenth century _Providence Journals_?”

Sam shook his head. He’d decided to try the direct approach. “No, ma’am. I’m hoping you could help me find some information on Japheth Wedderburn.”

“Hmm,” she said, mouth moving like she’d just bit into a lemon, while walking him towards the local history shelf. “The Wedderburn House?” She pulled out a little hardcover with the title, ‘Ghosts and Legends of Rhode Island.’

As if he hadn’t found that one in the card catalog on his first day, and read in it, ‘Narragansett’s Old Wedderburn House on Front Street is known to be haunted by a ghost responsible for a series of tragic deaths over the years.’ The house wasn’t actually on Front Street. Sam wasn’t sure where that rumor had started, but he automatically disregarded any story or report that repeated the misinformation.

“No,” Sam said. “I’m looking for the real story; primary sources. Not,” he said, trying to work up the right level of disgust, “ghost stories. I want to know what really happened to Japheth and his family.”

She returned the book to its shelf and then turned to inspect him. “Oh,” she said softly, eyebrows drawing down. “Emily was your auntie, wasn’t she? Is that why …”

Sam nodded, staring at the ground, trying to look like a kid who’s lost his aunt and cousin to a senseless tragedy.

“Well, you won’t find any more information here,” the librarian said briskly. “But you’re in luck. Elizabeth McIntyre was the matriarch of Rhode Island high-society at the time. She was a vicious gossip and a prolific letter writer. If you want to know about the skeletons in Japheth Wedderburn’s closet –“

Sam found himself nodding eagerly, because, yes, that was exactly what he needed to find out about.

“There’s a collection of her letters at the Narragansett Historical Society, down on Boynton Street. I’ll call and let Malcolm know you’re coming. Better hurry, they close at three, and it’s a large collection.”

Sam turned to leave, and then stopped at the last minute. “Oh, and if you see Christy, could you tell her I said hi?”

The librarian nodded indulgently and shooed him out the door.

Once Sam was outside, he pulled his ‘Welcome to Narragansett!’ visitor’s map out of his backpack. Boynton Street was towards the center of town. He jogged west for fifteen minutes until he found it, a quiet street lined with big empty houses.

He turned north and walked up the street until he spotted a middle-aged woman sporting a big sun hat and heavy work gloves attacking a rose bush with garden shears.

“Excuse me,” Sam called out cautiously from the sidewalk. She turned, wiping her face on her sleeve. “I’m looking for the Historical Society. Is it up this way?” he asked, pointing.

She shook her head no. “You’re heading the wrong direction,” she told him. “It’s about ten blocks thataway. The brick house on your left. You can’t miss it.”

The Historical Society was a tall brick house with a steepled roof and a tiny bronze plaque advertising its purpose. Sam had walked past it three times before he noticed the plaque. When he rang the bell, the door opened immediately, as if someone had been waiting on the other side.

“You must be Sam Bousquet,” droned the towering, cadaverous man with thinning brown hair who let him inside, eyes fixed somewhere over Sam’s shoulder. “We don’t normally allow students to access our collections, but Carol said you have an unusual respect for original documents. Elizabeth McIntrye's papers were kept by her daughter after her death in 1857. They remained in the family until they were donated to the Narragansett Historical Society in nineteen …”

Sam tuned out the curator’s explanation and series of warnings. The man insisted that he wash his hands, made him hand over his backpack, letting him keep only his notebook and a pencil, and had him sign a form agreeing to a bunch of rules and regulations. Then he sat Sam down in a dead silent reading room and brought him the letters, stored in a special box. The collection was organized into folders by year, and the librarian, Carol, hadn’t been kidding. Elizabeth wrote a lot of letters. The ink was a bit faded, but she had large, neat hand-writing. Sam dug in.

Four hours later Sam had a throbbing headache, the need to take a shower to get rid of the slimy feel of Elizabeth and the mean things she had to say about every single person she’d ever met, pages of notes of innuendo about Japheth Wedderburn and his ‘child-bride’, and the name of the woman who was definitely Japheth’s housekeeper, and possibly his mistress: Huldy Craddock. Japheth never married Miss Craddock, but judging by Elizabeth’s letters, the housekeeper resented his bride, the shy little Dona Mercedes Wedderburn from Barbados.

Sam stood up, and the curator immediately hustled over to him to inspect and collect the letters he’d read. The guy left the room with the box of letters hugged to his chest. Sam waited a minute, then grabbed his backpack from behind the table and legged it out of there.

It was almost three, so Sam went to see Dean at the video store. He munched on some free popcorn and filled Dean in on the housekeeper, in between customers. Dean decided they should try some daylight recon of the two graveyards he’d found that were in common use back then, to see if they could find Craddock’s grave. Once Dean got off at four they headed to the nearest of the two graveyards.

“So, are you going to call that girl, Christy?” Dean asked, kicking a can down the sidewalk.

“I didn’t get her number,” Sam confessed.

Dean squinted at Sam and kicked the can in his direction. Sam received the pass neatly and kicked it into the road. His soccer coach back in Mississippi would’ve been impressed.

“Didn’t get it because she didn’t want to give it to you, or because she passed out before she got the chance?” Dean asked.

Sam considered. “I think she’s still interested.”

“You should call her, then. Bet Andy would give you her number,” Dean said.

“I don’t really know her,” Sam protested.

“That’s what the phone call’s for, genius,” Dean countered. “That, and the date.”

“I don’t have any money to take her out,” Sam muttered, staring at his feet.

Dean stopped walking. Sam turned around to look at him. Dean pulled his wallet out of his back pocket. Sam made a face, expecting another condom. Instead, Dean handed him a twenty dollar bill.

“Ice cream at Brickley’s over by Scarborough. I hear it’s awesome. Saw some couples there the other night.”

“Yeah, okay. Thanks, Dean,” Sam said, taking the twenty. He folded it carefully and slid it into the inside pocket of his jeans.

They arrived at the black metal fence marking the edge of the cemetery.

“Less’n ten seconds to get over that one after dark,” Dean said.

Sam nodded his agreement, and fended off the concerned care-taker at the gate by holding up his back-pack with a cheerful, “Grave-rubbings!”

It only took twenty minutes of peering at nineteenth- century gravestones in the over-grown northern section of the graveyard to find, ‘ _Huldy, daughter of Reuben and Fanny Craddock. d. 6/14/1839, a. 28y 6m_ ’. An old maid at twenty-seven years of age, Sam figured, looking at the inscription. Only children and unmarried women were listed with their parents’ names like that, back then. She’d out-lasted Japheth, though, so they’d proven that Claudia’s bloody ghost story was wrong.

“Least if we need to burn this one’s bones, we know right where to find her,” Dean said. “Come on, we better hurry, Dad’ll be pissed if we’re late for dinner.”

When they got back to the trailer, Dad wasn’t home yet. Sam went to ask Andy for Christy’s phone number. He emerged from Andy’s cottage thirty minutes later with the number, a head full of advice, and a grocery bag full of left-overs from the potluck.

Dad still wasn’t back. It was past seven, and he was supposed to meet them here at six. Dean didn’t say anything about it, so neither did Sam. They heated up the left-overs, leaving Dad a plate in the tiny fridge. Sam and Dean ate, washed up, and watched ‘Die Hard’, pretending that everything was fine.

They finally heard the Impala’s rumble a little after nine. Sam ran outside. Dean hovered in the doorway of the trailer.

Dad had a white cast on his left arm. He gestured Sam into the trailer, closed the door behind him, and settled onto the bed with a groan that was barely audible over the explosions from the TV. Sam sat on his bunk. Dean turned off the movie and stood there, staring down at Dad.

Dad glanced at Dean’s face, and sat upright. “I should have called from the ER. I didn’t realize how long it would take,” he explained.

“What happened?” Dean asked.

Dad gave a side-ways nod. “Well, it seems like the ghost is stepping up the violence of her attacks and changing her profile. I was climbing up to the widow’s walk, and she pushed me down the stairs.”

“You saw the ghost?” Sam asked eagerly.

“Very small, female, wearing a black veil,” Dad answered.

“Right, that’s got to be Japheth’s wife! I’ve got her name, Dona Mercedes Wedderburn, and a description, but no death notice or grave site. She disappeared sometime in 1835 or 1836,” Sam said.

Dean moved over to Sam’s bunk and sat down beside him, shoving him over. “How’s the arm?” he asked pointedly.

Sam felt a sudden flush of shame that he’d started grilling Dad about the ghost without even making sure he was okay first.

Dad raised his arm. “Oh, it’s a simple fracture across the ulnar. Shouldn’t take more than six weeks to heal up.”

Dean got Dad’s dinner out of the fridge and heated it up for him. He made sure that Dad took his pain meds and then helped him into bed when they kicked in.

“I’m going out,” Dean told Sam quietly once Dad dropped off. “If Dad wakes up, give him another pain pill.”

“I’m coming with you,” Sam said.

Dean shook his head. “Not tonight, Sammy. No fake ID in the world is getting you into a bar.”

“You’re not going to a bar,” Sam said scornfully. “You’re going to Wedderburn House.”

Dean went still, his usual response to getting caught in a lie.

“And if you think you can tuck me into bed and go hunt the ghost that likes to kill kids alone, you’re crazy,” Sam informed him in a hushed, furious voice. Four days without a call in Denver; Dad showing up more than three hours late tonight – Sam couldn’t take a night of sitting up in bed waiting, not knowing if Dean was ever coming back.

“I’m not a kid,” Dean said. “But you are. No way am I letting you anywhere near that house.”

Sam shrugged. “So I’ll stay in the car.”

Dean’s lip twisted unhappily.

“It’s either that or I wake Dad up,” Sam threatened.

“Fine,” Dean agreed grudgingly.

It was cooler outside tonight. Sam would have gone back into the trailer for a shirt to throw on over his t-shirt, but he was pretty sure Dean would drive off without him if he did.

Wedderburn House was north, on the outskirts of town, but Dean drove fifteen minutes west to a truck stop on I-95. He filled up two gas cans and told Sam to grab some match books when the guy at the counter wasn’t looking. Sam filled his pockets with a dozen matchbooks and was waiting in the car when Dean got back.

“We’re gonna burn the place down?” Sam asked incredulously when they got back on the road, car pointing east towards Narragansett.

“Don’t need to worry about the haunted house killing people if there’s no house,” Dean answered. “You get those matches?”

Sam handed them over. Dean slid a Zeppelin tape in and turned it up too loud for conversation. There wasn’t much traffic on the two-lane highway and Sam zoned out a little, tired from a long day and lulled by being back on the road again. Dean turned onto a residential street and then they were driving between two tall, over-grown hedges and up a giant driveway that made a circle in front of Wedderburn House.

Dean got out of the car and pulled the cans of gasoline out of the trunk.

Sam rolled down his window. “Be careful,” he told his brother.

Dean rolled his eyes. “I’ll be out in ten. I left the keys in the ignition, but keep the engine off – we don’t want any neighbors showing up to investigate the strange car while I’m in there.” With a wink, he headed towards the front door.

Sam pressed the light button on his watch. It was 12:47. At 12:57, if Dean hadn’t come out, he was going in.

Dean walked up the front steps. He set the two gas cans down on the porch and stood in front of the door. It was a big fancy one, with a carved wooden pineapple at the top. Sam thought maybe Japheth had carved it there for his wife, a little taste of Barbados in her new home. Sam wondered if Dean had gotten the house key from Dad’s key ring, or if he was picking the lock. Dean opened the door, picked up the gas cans, and stepped inside.

Sam hunkered down in his seat so he could check out the house. Wedderburn House didn’t look run-down, not like some haunted houses Sam had seen. It was a four-story white clapboard house with dark green shutters. Dad had mentioned a gallery on the third floor. Sam leaned out the car window and squinted to make out the set of picture windows up there. He couldn’t get a decent angle to check out the widow’s walk up on the roof, not from inside the car. Sam decided not to piss Dean off by getting out. Not unless he had to.

Sam checked his watch. 12:49. He thought through what they knew about this ghost, looking for anything that might help if Dean got into trouble. It was the ghost of Dona Mercedes, Japheth’s wife. She’d disappeared in the winter of 1885 or spring of 1886. Past that, all Sam had were rumors and possibilities. Mercedes had most likely been murdered, although suicide was a possibility; women who died of natural causes didn’t become vengeful spirits. Since she’d killed people both in the house and on the grounds, she was probably buried somewhere around here, but Dad hadn’t been able to find the grave. The body might have been hidden somewhere inside the house. Remains that weren’t treated with respect often led to hauntings.

And none of that, none of it was helpful. None of it mattered, not with Dean in the house with her. Sam looked at his watch. It was 12:53.

Dona Mercedes Wedderburn. Sam painted a picture of her in his mind, the tiny, shy girl that Japheth Wedderburn had taken from her home in Barbados and left here in this giant, empty house with a housekeeper who hated her guts while he was off captaining his ship for months at a time.

Sam checked his watch. 12:55. Two more minutes, and he was going to drag Dean out of there. Mercedes barely spoke any English, Sam remembered from Elizabeth McIntyre’s letters. Sam imagined her standing all alone up on that widow’s walk, waiting for her husband to come home. She must have been so lonely. Maybe Mercedes wasn’t taking out the competition after all. Maybe she was looking for company.

Dean came running out the front door. Sam popped out of the car and threw himself at Dean for a quick hug. Dean smelled like gasoline and smoke.

“Did it go okay?” Sam asked, when what he really meant was, ‘Are you okay?’

“Yeah, no problem,” Dean said with a grin and a little bounce. “Plenty of drapes and flammable stuff in there. Should go up like a box of matches.” He turned and glanced at the house, yellow-orange flame already flickering in the windows of the first and second floors. Dean looked up and froze. “Oh, fuck.”

Sam craned his neck. There was a tiny figure up in the gallery, peering down at them from the picture window.

“I checked!” Dean said frantically. “I swear, I checked, there was nobody in there.” He took a step towards the house.

Sam lunged and grabbed his brother’s shirt. “Dean, it’s not a person, it’s the ghost.”

Dean looked up at the window and then down at him. “Are you sure? Sammy, I can’t … you’ve got to be sure.”

“I am,” Sam lied with absolute certainty. Sam was ninety, ninety-five percent sure it was the ghost. Mercedes was sneaky, and lonely, and she wanted company in the after-life. This was exactly the kind of stunt she’d pull. Plus, Sam was not letting his brother run back into that burning building. Even if it was a real person, it was too late to get her out. All Dean could do was get himself killed trying to save her.

“Okay.” Dean let out a ragged breath. “Okay, let’s get out of here before the fire trucks show up.”

* * *

Late the next morning Dad rolled out of bed, brushed his teeth, took a piss, and then took off in the car. He came back thirty minutes later carrying a bag of donuts, with a newspaper stuffed under his arm and a look on his face that Sam didn’t recognize. Sam and Dean were already sitting outside at the picnic table with Folgers and orange juice, eating the stale ends of a loaf of bread slathered with peanut butter.

Dad dropped the bag of donuts on the table and then pointedly spread the local section of the _Providence Journal_ out on the table for them to read.

“Seems the Wedderburn House burned down last night,” Dad said. “The Fire Marshall suspects arson. I don’t suppose you know anything about that? ” he asked Dean.

Dean chewed slowly, then licked the last traces of peanut butter off his lips and washed it down with a sip of coffee. “Why, should I?” he asked, not meeting Dad’s eyes.

“Damn it, Dean …” Dad sat down heavily. He sighed, then opened the bag of donuts and pushed it towards Dean. Dean bit his lip, looked inside, and pulled out a Boston crème. He passed the bag to Sam, who found his favorite, a maple bar, at the bottom.

“The fire brigade found a body,” Dad said.

Sam tensed up. Had there really been someone trapped upstairs in that fire?

“There was a coffin hidden in the wall behind the fireplace,” Dad continued.

Sam felt the relief of it burst through him, but he held onto a poker face. Dad couldn’t know that there’d been any chance of them hurting someone with that fire. More importantly, neither could Dean.

Dad picked up the paper and read to them, “The coffin was of a nineteenth century design. It contained the desiccated corpse of a woman wearing a tortoise shell comb and a black lace veil.” He tapped the paper. “Well, the good news is that while I was waiting around for them to see me at the E.R., I found out that the county medical examiner works in the morgue in the basement of the hospital. Either of you boys want to come with me to break into the morgue tonight for a salt and burn?”

Dean nodded enthusiastically.

“Sure,” Sam said drily. “The family that B and E’s together, stays together.” That was what passed for quality time in the Winchester family. Since all of his research had been completely pointless, and Dean’s pyromania had saved the day, he should at least try to help out somehow on this hunt.

A grey Crown Victoria cruised up the street and pulled to a stop next to the Impala. A state trooper in his late twenties wearing actual honest to god aviator sunglasses stepped out.

“Mr. Bousquet?” he said to Dad, one hand resting on the butt of his gun.

“Yes, officer,” Dad said with both hands resting on the table, white cast on display.

“I need to ask you some questions about the goings-on at the Wedderburn House last night,” the cop said.

“Do you mean my accident, or the fire?” Dad asked.

“You know about the fire?” the cop said, as if Dad had confessed.

“I was just reading the story in the paper to my boys,” Dad told him. “They think it was arson?”

“That’s what I’m here to talk to you about,” the trooper said pointedly.

“Hmm,” Dad said, brow wrinkling. “I can understand why you might think it was for the insurance money, but I can’t imagine Dick being involved in anything like that.” Sam was impressed by the deflection. “I mean, he lost his wife and little girl this spring, and their things were all still in the house. Now he won’t have anything…” Dad looked down at his cast with a deep sigh.

Sam personally thought the sigh pushed it over the top, but it seemed to work.

The trooper took off his sunglasses, tucked them into his shirt pocket, and sat down at the table with them. “I’d heard,” he said quietly. “We haven’t been able to get in touch with your brother.”

“As far as I know, he’s still in Boston,” Dad said, “I can give you his number, if that would help.”

The trooper nodded and jotted down Dick Bousquet’s phone number when Dad rattled it off. He stood up and nodded to them. “I might be back later. I assume you’re not planning on leaving town any time soon?”

“Of course not,” Dad agreed pleasantly. They watched as the trooper drove off, keeping to the posted speed limit. “We’ll stay away from the trailer until we hit the morgue, then cross state lines tonight,” Dad told them tightly.

Dad drove them to Aunt Carrie’s for lunch. Not their fake aunt, or anyone’s aunt in particular – that was just the name of the restaurant.

“Andy says we haven’t lived until we’ve tasted these clam cakes,” Dad said.

The place was near the beach, full of families and groups of people in beach clothes and flip flops, barely obeying the ‘No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service’ sign posted on the door. Inside, Sam started laughing when he saw they’d be sitting at … a picnic table. They ordered a dozen clam cakes and a bowl of chowder each, since that was the specialty.

The frazzled waitress was a girl who didn’t look old enough to be working in a restaurant– Sam thought he recognized her from the bonfire party. “Red, white, or clear?” she snapped.

“What’s that?” Dad said.

“Your chowder. Do you want it red, white, or clear?”

“What’s the difference?” Sam asked.

She sighed. “It’s the broth. Do you want it milked-based, New England-style? Tomato-based, which is Manhattan-style? Or clear, Rhode Island-style?”

They ordered one bowl of each, so they could try them all. Dad liked the red one best. Sam and Dean ended up sharing the clear and white.

The clam cakes weren’t the flat, breaded circles Sam had been expecting. They were huge balls of fried dough, bigger than Sam’s fist, with peaks and lumps and valleys that made each shape unique.

With little glances around the dining room, Dean decided that the local method of eating them involved dunking part of the clam cake into the chowder, and then quickly eating the wet bit before it could disappear into the depths of your chowder bowl. Sam copied him, and pretty soon they were going through handfuls of paper towels from the roll on the table, making a contest of who could eat them in the messiest, most disgusting way.

Dad had been tense all morning, but watching them goof around, he grinned and flagged their waitress over.

“Could I get some of those lobster bibs for my boys?” he asked.

She snickered at Sam, and tied the plastic bibs around his and Dean’s neck. Dad paid with a credit card, something he’d avoided when they thought they might be in town for a while. The three of them wandered the beach for a couple hours, killing time.

Dean pointed them towards Brickley’s, and Sam treated the three of them to ice cream with the twenty Dean had given him. He had a double scoop of Coffee Oreo on a hand-made waffle cone, which was almost good enough to deserve the orgasm noises Dean made over his Cake Batter and Apple Pie flavored double scoop. Sam shrugged at the girls giggling at them from the next table and figured it was maybe a good thing they were taking off tonight.

They trooped into South County Hospital a little after six - after business hours, but during peak visiting hours so they blended with the crowd. Dad led them down some stairs and along a hallway to the morgue in the basement. It smelled funny in there, like bleach and antiseptics, stronger than it had in the rest of the hospital. Dad turned on the lights. The fluorescents flickered on, revealing blank white walls, a concrete floor, two stainless steel tables, and a wall of cold-storage drawers.

Dean and Dad started pulling open the drawers the bodies were stored in, checking them, and then slamming them closed again. Sam caught glimpses of blank faces and cold flesh. He swallowed and ducked outside the door for a quick look around.

There was a neon exit sign at the end of the hallway, but the door said it was for ‘Emergency Exit Only - Alarm Will Sound.’ Sam slipped back into the morgue to let Dad know.

Dad was standing over an open drawer. “Okay, I guess we’ll just take care of it right here,” he said when Sam told him about the door. “I need the salt and gasoline.”

Sam unzipped his backpack. He pulled out the salt canister and handed it to Dad. Dad shook the salt out over the corpse in the drawer, one-handed, then traded Sam for the can of gasoline while Dean lit a book of matches.

The fluorescent lights flickered overhead and a ghost wearing a black dress appeared in front of Sam. She was tiny; smaller than Sam and about his age. She pushed back her veil, and Sam was struck by the sad look in her eyes.

Sam wondered what happened to her. Had she really still-birthed six babies and buried them in the family plot? Did her husband murder her? Was it the housekeeper? Or was she a suicide, left all alone in that big house over a cold Rhode Island winter? She flickered closer to Sam, smiling shyly, and reached towards his face.

Dean gasped. “Sam, the salt!” he yelled.

Sam flung the open salt container at the ghost. She disappeared with a silent wail. The gasoline lit with a whump behind Sam. He turned and saw flames dancing merrily above the cold-storage drawer.

Dad turned to him and took a breath to speak.

An ear-splitting wail of a fire alarm went off, and water gushed from the automatic sprinklers over-head.

“Fuck,” Dad yelled, slamming the drawer closed.

“Don’t let it close all the way,” Dean shouted over the alarm. “If there’s an air-tight seal, it’ll put out the fire and the bitch’ll be after Sam again.”

Dad nodded. He pulled the drawer open a careful inch. Sam moved to grab the salt and gasoline cans, but Dad shook his head, put his good hand on Sam’s shoulder, and dragged him out of the morgue. They evacuated the hospital in a flood of confused, worried patients, staff, and visitors. Fire trucks were already pulling up outside and a woman with a bull horn was directing ambulatory patients to evacuation zones.

Dad herded them towards the car. They all got in and drove away, slowly and smoothly.

“So,” Dad said as they reached the highway. “Smoke detectors and an automatic sprinkler system. Didn’t see that one coming.”

Dean cracked up, then Dad, and Sam found himself laughing along.

“Can you picture,” Dean said, gasping for breath, “the look, on those firemen’s faces?” He howled with laughter and set Sam off again. Eventually they all ran out of laughs. Sam sat in the back seat nursing a headache.

“I pulled a salt-and-burn in a morgue once before,” Dad explained. “But it was in a big city, and the Medical Examiner’s Office was in a stand-alone building. It never occurred to me …” He shook his head. “If either of you boys see me start to pull a bone-head maneuver like that again, you have my permission to kick my ass.”

They pulled off the highway onto the beach road. Sam opened the window so he could smell the sea. It was a short drive. The sun was setting, casting long shadows as they pulled onto the grass in front of their, no, in front of Dick Bousquet’s trailer.

Sam went in and ran a sweep through the bathroom – that was always his job. He packed up their toiletries and stowed it in the back of the car along with the garbage bag of dirty clothes. They usually did the laundry before leaving town, but between the suspected arson at the Wedderburn House and that botched salt-and-burn at the hospital, washing Dean’s gasoline and smoke-scented clothes at the local Laundromat would be pushing their luck.

Sam grabbed his duffel and his feather pillow, lugged them out to the car, piled them on top of their other stuff, and rearranged it into a comfortable nest for himself. It had only taken them ten minutes to pull up stakes. They were all good at it by now; this time, Sam hadn’t even bothered unpacking.

Dad dropped the key off with Andy, who escorted them down to the exit and waved good-bye. Sam watched him out the back window of the car as they drove off.

Sam checked his pockets to make sure he had Dad’s pain pills and found the slip of paper with Christy’s number in one of them. He pulled it out. By the time they stopped for the night so he could call, they’d probably be three states over. Sam stuck the paper out the window and let go. It fluttered away into the twilight. He wasn’t sure why he’d even bothered getting it from Andy. Sam should really know better by now.

Dad drove west on US-1 towards the Connecticut border, 25 miles away. Traffic slowed to a crawl as they passed some road construction. A neon sign warned of men at work, although Sam didn’t see anything except a bunch of orange cones. Sam couldn’t smell the sea anymore, just the fumes from the cars, so he rolled up the car window.

‘Connecticut Welcomes You’ declared a sign by the side of the road. Everyone in the car relaxed as they crossed state lines.

Sam felt sorry for Mercedes Wedderburn, but he wasn’t anything like her. He wasn’t alone; he had Dean and Dad. And as much as he hated never staying anywhere long enough to put down roots, at least it meant he’d never had a home to miss.

Sam leaned forwards. “Dad? You think, if we don’t have any big hunts to get to right away, we could maybe go see Uncle Bobby?”

Dad’s eyes met his in the rear-view mirror. Sam held his breath; he knew that South Dakota was a whole two thousand miles away. That was a lot of wasted time and wasted gas, when they could just stop at the nearest motel until Dad picked out their next hunt.

“Good idea, Sam,” Dad said gruffly. “The Impala could use a little work on her transmission, and you boys need to practice your Latin.”

“What’s wrong with her transmission?” Dean asked, confused.

Dad cleared his throat. “Preventative maintenance,” he clarified. “And you _definitely_ need to practice your Latin, Dean.”

“Yes sir,” Dean mumbled. “Hey,” he said more brightly. “Bobby said next time we came by he’d show me how to rebuild an engine. You think he’s got one ready to work on?”

“Salvage yard that size, I’m sure he’s got some junker we can train you on,” Dad agreed. He pulled onto I-95 and settled into the slipstream behind an eighteen-wheeler. Sam noticed that Dad shifted in his seat, and then shifted again, as if he couldn’t get comfortable.

“Your arm hurting?” Sam guessed. When he broke his arm last winter it throbbed like crazy for the first week. Sam pulled Dad’s pills out of his pocket and reached forward to offer them.

“No,” Dad denied immediately. “Well …” he glanced over at Dean. “It’s a little sore, actually. Dean, you feel up to driving? I might take a pill and sack out for a while.”

“No problem,” Dean said eagerly.

Dad pulled over to the side of the road. He and Dean swapped seats. Dad dry swallowed a pill and leaned back in the passenger seat as Dean carefully pulled out into traffic. ‘One of These Nights’ was playing on the stereo, so quiet Sam could barely hear it. He drifted off to sleep to the sound of Dad’s rasping half-snores.


End file.
